This past Saturday, I moved across Los Angeles. Or, I began to. As the result of a few minor snafus, my life was split into two awkward halves.
Things Transferred To My New Apartment
All furniture, including bed
Television set
Most of my clothes
All of my shoes (including my business casual work shoes)
All toiletries
Things Left Behind In My Old Apartment
All of my work clothes
Mini grill (accidentally left on porch)
Lots of dust
DVR Box
Things My New Apartment Does Not Have That My Old Apartment Has
Hot water
Electricity
Internet
Cable
Things My Old Apartment Does Not Have That My New Apartment Has
A bed
Work shoes
Toiletries
Things Residing In The In-Between Area, aka My Car
Three tank tops
A pair of jeans
Tennis shoes
Flats that were ruined during a rainstorm in Ohio
My computer and its power cord
The novel manuscript I am reading
My yoga mat
A one gallon gas canister (which I always have in my car, in case I run out of gas on the highway again)
* * *
The way my home has managed to split itself like a perfect comedy of errors has left me feeling as if I have nowhere to live at all. Though this vagabond-y, nowhere to sleep (do I chose the place with the bed or the place with hot water for a shower?) feeling is new; the sense of not having a home crept into my psyche much earlier.
Three years ago, when I first moved into my old apartment, it felt like home, despite the horrible blinds and horrible carpet. The first year there, my two roommates and I built a home-space together. Then, they left for different reasons but in the same month, and although I managed to find one great new roommate, the third bedroom morphed from a room in a home into a sleeping box with a rotating door.
During my second year in the old apartment, I shared space with a roommate who refused to talk to me except to make small talk about the weather and who kept her alcohol in her room as if she was afraid I would steal it. She left, semi-abruptly, without cleaning her bedroom.
I found another roommate who seemed promising. She gave notice after three weeks, when a random personal emergency forced her to move back in with her parents in Orange County.
The room stayed empty for a month, until a good friend from high school took it over while he was doing a summer internship in Torrance, CA. He stayed for two months, and while he was living in my old apartment, he made the difficult decision to transfer law schools, from NYU to Yale. He left with his own sense of placelessness, as if infected.
My cousin graduated from USC and took over the room. My friend stayed on the couch for her month, after finishing a job in San Francisco but before starting grad school in Santa Barbara. My good roommate unofficially moved in with his girlfriend. The blinds and the carpet both got more horrible, due to neglect.
My cousin, my roommate, and I all decided to leave the apartment at the same time. We gave our 30 days notice on January 11, 2012, at which point I stopped cleaning.
The sense of home is a feeling, a vibe — in other words, a fiction. A fiction someone else builds for you, or you build for yourself. Since Jan. 11, I’ve been browsing a lot of interior design blogs, trying to figure out how to build myself the right vibe. The new apartment has wood floors, which is a good start, but all of my old furniture, which still feels like it belongs in the old apartment with its transitory inhabitants.
I’m going to try to remember the day my new apartment starts to feel like home but I will probably fail at identifying the boundary between not-home and home. I think it will come over me gradually.
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